The emergence of ethics engineering in Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being successfully adopted in innovative industrial applications in different sectors, e.g., manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, smart grids, and smart transportation. However, the potential direct or indirect threats of using AI are not sufficiently investigated in these domains, and as a result, unwanted vulnerabilities are introduced in industrial applications, e.g., related to business info leakage, privacy, and even undesired/false training and learning of personnel and automated processes. The ethical dimension is new ground for most industrial applications and poses a significant challenge in AI systems overall, and especially for complex Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPS), which are based on collective intelligence and exhibit autonomy, emergence and self-organization. This work discusses the importance and implications of ethics in industrial AI-based systems such as the ICPS. For this purpose, the concept of ethics in such intelligent systems is surveyed and characterized using a bibliometric literature review, and then, areas linked to ethics, as well as the main challenges for engineering ethically compliant ICPS are discussed.